The Perilous Public Square

Americans of all political persuasions fear that “free speech” is under attack. This may seem strange at a time when legal protections for free expression remain strong and overt government censorship minimal. Yet a range of political, economic, social, and technological developments have raised profound challenges for how we manage speech. New threats to political discourse are mounting—from the rise of authoritarian populism and national security secrecy to the decline of print journalism and public trust in experts to the “fake news,” trolling, and increasingly subtle modes of surveillance made possible by digital technologies. The Perilous Public Square brings together leading thinkers to identify and investigate today’s multifaceted threats to free expression. They go beyond the campus and the courthouse to pinpoint key structural changes in the means of mass communication and forms of global capitalism. Beginning with Tim Wu’s inquiry into whether the First Amendment is obsolete, Matthew Connelly, Jack Goldsmith, Kate Klonick, Frederick Schauer, Olivier Sylvain, and Heather Whitney explore ways to address these dangers and preserve the essential features of a healthy democracy. Their conversations with other leading thinkers, including Danielle Keats Citron, Jelani Cobb, Frank Pasquale, Geoffrey R. Stone, Rebecca Tushnet, and Kirsten Weld, cross the disciplinary boundaries of First Amendment law, internet law, media policy, journalism, legal history, and legal theory, offering fresh perspectives on fortifying the speech system and reinvigorating the public square.

How to put democracy at the heart of AI governance Artificial intelligence and machine learning are reshaping our world. Police forces use them to decide where to send police officers, judges to decide whom to release on bail, welfare agencies to decide which children are at risk of abuse, and Facebook and Google to rank content and distribute ads. In these spheres, and many others, powerful prediction tools are changing how decisions are made, narrowing opportunities for the exercise of judgment, empathy, and creativity. In Algorithms for the People, Josh Simons flips the narrative about how we govern these technologies. Instead of examining the impact of technology on democracy, he explores how to put democracy at the heart of AI governance. Drawing on his experience as a research fellow at Harvard University, a visiting research scientist on Facebook’s Responsible AI team, and a policy advisor to the UK’s Labour Party, Simons gets under the hood of predictive technologies, offering an accessible account of how they work, why they matter, and how to regulate the institutions that build and use them. He argues that prediction is political: human choices about how to design and use predictive tools shape their effects. Approaching predictive technologies through the lens of political theory casts new light on how democracies should govern political choices made outside the sphere of representative politics. Showing the connection between technology regulation and democratic reform, Simons argues that we must go beyond conventional theorizing of AI ethics to wrestle with fundamental moral and political questions about how the governance of technology can support the flourishing of democracy.

"The market size and strength of the major digital platform companies has invited international concern about how such firms should best be regulated to serve the interests of wider society, with a particular emphasis on the need for new anti-trust legislation. Using a normative innovation systems approach, this paper investigates how current anti-trust models may insufficiently address the value-extracting features of existing data-intensive and platform-oriented industry behaviour and business models. To do so, we employ the concept of economic rents to investigate how digital platforms create and extract value. Two forms of rent are elaborated: 'network monopoly rents' and 'algorithmic rents.' By identifying such rents more precisely, policymakers and researchers can better direct regulatory investigations, as well as broader industrial and innovation policy approaches, to shape the features of platform-driven digital markets"--

A broad explanation of the various dimensions of the problem of bad speech on the internet within the American context. One of the most fiercely debated issues of this era is what to do about bad speech-hate speech, disinformation and propaganda campaigns, and incitement of violence-on the internet, and in particular speech on social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. In Social Media, Freedom of Speech, and the Future of our Democracy, Lee C. Bollinger and Geoffrey R. Stone have gathered an eminent cast of contributors--including Hillary Clinton, Amy Klobuchar, Sheldon Whitehouse, Mark Warner, Newt Minow, Tim Wu, Cass Sunstein, Jack Balkin, Emily Bazelon, and others--to explore the various dimensions of this problem in the American context. They stress how difficult it is to develop remedies given that some of these forms of bad speech are ordinarily protected by the First Amendment. Bollinger and Stone argue that it is important to remember that the last time we encountered major new communications technology-television and radio-we established a federal agency to provide oversight and to issue regulations to protect and promote the public interest. Featuring a variety of perspectives from some of America's leading experts on this hotly contested issue, this volume offers new insights for the future of free speech in the social media era.

This timely book presents a detailed analysis of the role of law and regulation in the utilisation of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the media sector. As well as contributing to the wider discussion on law and AI, the book also digs deeper by exploring pressing issues at the intersections of AI, media, and the law. Chapters critically re-examine various rights and responsibilities from the perspectives of incentives for accountable utilisation of AI in the industry.

We now inhabit a digital world. Social media has changed and challenged some of our most basic understandings of truth, faith, and even the idea of a public square. In The Digital Public Square, editor Jason Thacker has chosen top Christian voices to help the church navigate the issues of censorship, conspiracy theories, sexual ethics, hate speech, religious freedom, and tribalism. In this unique work, David French, Patricia Shaw, and many others cast a distinctly Christian vision of a digital public theology to promote the common good throughout society.

The main objectives of media regulation in Europe are to protect media freedom, to ensure the social responsibility of the media, and to prevent harm caused by speech published through the media. This book examines the way in which these are reflected in European legal regimes and jurisprudence at the supranational, regional, and national levels. It addresses the theoretical considerations behind the protection and restriction of media freedom. It starts from the assumption that there is a common European ideal of media freedom as a human right. Apart from EU law, and in many cases similar national regulations, many common points can be identified across Europe in the theoretical underpinnings of this right, and the history of struggles for this freedom in different European countries also shows common features. While the focus is on media freedom in Europe, the work also discusses the uniquely distinct concept of freedom of expression and of the media that is prevalent in the US, the principles of which have a significant impact in Europe. The book uses a comparative method, in part, as it attempts to outline the common regulatory framework for the idea of media freedom on a European scale. The reference to national laws and court decisions is intended to illustrate this picture, looking primarily at what binds European states together. The work will be a valuable resource for those working in the areas of public law, media law, media studies, comparative law, international human rights law, and legal philosophy.

Privacy can function as an expressive, anti-subordination tool of resistance that is worthy of constitutional protection.